Deploying software packages in a network can be done in many ways. The need to bring products to market faster and integrate new technologies into existing systems is a challenging task in front of developers and administrators. So a fast and effective way of deployment is needed to incase of software deployments rather than conventional methods of deployment like deploying software from the end user side or assigning a specific team for deployment purposes. Here comes the importance of Deployment Automation.

What Is Deployment Automation

Deployment automation refers to a software deployment technique to release new features faster and more frequently in a system without much delay. In a competitive environment, companies should develop and deploy as fast and as efficiently as possible to sustain. On manual deployment or having any human effort on the deployment may take some time to create the testing environment and to find bugs when the application interacts in the testing environment. So it’s very important to deploy software as fast as possible. This needs quick and accurate feedback on the deployed software from the testing environment. In other words, software testing is a very important aspect to find out the quality of software. So any delay in this will affect a whole more delay on the software deployment at the end-user.

What are the Key Benefits of Deployment Automation?

Reduction in error

Of Course, automation in any field will reduce the error than when any human involvement is present except if the configured automation system itself is not correct. In deployment there is no exception, humans could make mistakes in the codes while creating testing environments, or any missed steps in the deployment process. All this will lead to some kind of issues for the end-user after the software is deployed into the market.

Monitoring, logging, and quick feedbacks

Monitoring and logging tools can make it a lot easier in collecting data about your application’s health. A monitoring tool will allow you to set alerts to find issues with your deployed application. Also, this will help to get instant feedback on the software, which will eliminate the time consumption in the rework.

Anyone can deploy software 

Since the automation itself means automating the process, there is less need for human involvement, so anyone in the team can deploy the software who happens to know how to deploy. So there is no need to put a single dedicated person for the deployment. This will also fasten the deployment process in a way.

Deployment in a new testing environment

Once the deployment is done in one testing environment we can repeat it as many times as we can. Since there is only change in the testing environment we need to make changes to the current existing deployment set-up, and if there is no change and the environment is a replica we need to just set up the same deployment automation in the new environment and the rest will be taken care of by the automation. This will also reduce the cost reduction in deploying to a new environment.

Increased Productivity

With the automation, the developers can concentrate on other works as well and can look at the future updates of the current software and work towards it, instead of wasting time in deployment and bug fixing. This will eventually increase the productivity of the whole team and simultaneously and frequently work on different projects.

Despite these many advantages, some are still using the conventional methods due to the task behind configuring the deployment automation. However, there are some deployment automation tools available in the market which will reduce the prior task mentioned. Some examples are

• Jenkins
• Visual Studio
• ElectricFlow
• AWS CodeDeploy
• IBM UrbanCode
• TeamCity